mutteringhousewife

February 11, 2013

Choc Mint Slice

My husband likes to make requests of me, he thinks it makes me feel useful. Some make me furrow my brow not inconsiderably, like the “please sort out the Outlook 2010/IMAP problems”, which has defeated greater minds than mine. Some I greet with whoops of joy, like “please can I have morning tea for ten people for a meeting on Sunday morning”. Catering, but without the paperwork.

I decide to give him tea scented shortbread, ANZAC biscuits, hazelnut biscotti and something chocolate. He put on his sad face and said “but, there aren’t any ginger nuts!”. He keeps asking not to make those because he’ll just be compelled to eat them all, and then where will the schoolgirl figure be? Men. I can just about make them in my sleep, so he got a batch of those. The chocolate brownies I usually make just weren’t quite right, so the kids get them (there’s only three pieces left). I’m wondering if Pepe Saya butter isn’t so great with chocolate or what’s going on. It was the perfect opportunity to make some chocolate mint slice, something I’ve been contemplating for quite some time.

I knew what I wanted was a more robust version of the after dinner mints that I’ve stopped refining because I kept eating them. The Internet wasn’t the place for recipes because a mint slice appears to be one of those weird recipes that people want to make with crushed up mint chocolate bars. Why wouldn’t you just eat the chocolate bar? Women’s Weekly Cakes and Slices had the closest to what I was looking for, but it will need to undergo further refinement, so let me know if you want to volunteer for testing.

Even so, this looked like one of those recipes where they’d let their attention wander a bit. The base was unusual, but I took them at their word and it produced a fairly dense cake layer, which worked well when the slice was at room temperature, but not when it had been refrigerated. Here’s how to make the base:
Mix together 2/3 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder, 1/4 of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, 1/3 of a cup of caster sugar and their grams of softened butter. Stir in a third of a cup of water. Stir in an egg. Pour this lot into a baking paper lined 25 by 30 cm slice tin or, in my case, roasting pan. Bake at 180 degrees for about twenty minutes.

I was happy with the peppermint filling. You mix a tablespoon of vegetable oil with two and quarter cups of icing sugar and one and a half teaspoons of peppermint essence in a heat proof bowl. Actually, it doesn’t mix at all, so you add in three tablespoons of milk. When you’ve incorporated most of the icing sugar and you have a stiff paste, starting mixing it over a saucepan of boiling water until it becomes spreadable. I’d suggest wrapping you hands in a teatowel, steam burns are unpleasant. If you can’t get it to form a paste, add a touch more milk. The recipe oddly didn’t specify the amount of peppermint essence, but I thought one and a half teaspoons was about right. Spread the paste over the slightly cooled base. You want to wait a bit, otherwise you’ll tear the base up. Stick this into the fridge until it’s firm.

They then suggest melting 125 grams of dark chocolate with 90 grams of unsalted butter (in a bowl over boiling water) to spread over the top. Now I know from experience that if you just melt straight chocolate and spread it on the slice you’ll get a chocolate layer that is very delicious but impossible to cut without shattering unless you want to muck around with a hot knife. The butter is to make it softer, but as it turns out I think this combination is too soft, you have to lick your fingers after eating. I might try 40 grams of butter with 170 grams of chocolate next time.

I’m also going to try for more of a biscuit base next time, then I can have the soft chocolate on top and serve it refrigerated. Or if I stick with the cake base, a much firmer chocolate layer. I wouldn’t mind trying this version of peppermint fondant in an after dinner mint either, maybe in disc form dipped in chocolate. But perhaps I should be thinking of my schoolgirl figure.

Leave a comment

February 8, 2013

The Kids’ Favourite Ice Block – So Far

It is mango season, but I’m finding the classic eating mango, the Kensington Pride, a little pricey at the moment, and I’m not willing to commit to a case of them. There are a lot more varieties of mango about than there used to be in the olden days, and the ones I’m buying are the giant ones that evoke Star Wars for us, the R2E2. The kids aren’t that keen to eat them straight, though will at a pinch, but there’s such a lot of flesh on them that they just groan with potential.

The first thing to do when you get the kids all hot and sweaty from school is to cut the cheeks off an R2E2 and scoop the flesh into the blender. Pour in a slug of the lime syrup we made a few blogs ago, add a cup of ice and press Smoothie on your fancy blender. Instant refreshment for three kids, if you use the small glasses. But the way they like them best is in iceblock form.

My iceblock moulds are the rocket shaped Avanti ones that you can put a wooden paddle pop stick into. It makes them feel like a real iceblock. So take the flesh of one giant mango and insert it into your blender. Add the flesh of half a pineapple, cut that really hard core bit out. Add one lime, from which you have removed the peel and hopefully saved the zest for cola syrup. Add a third of a cup of coconut cream. You put the rest of the tin into a little Decor plastic container for the next batch that you will inevitably be making the next time Graham Creed talks about high pressure systems over central Australia. Press the Smoothie button on the aforementioned fancy blender. I get about twelve ice blocks out of this, which annoys me a little because the moulds are in sets of eight. The kids whinge a little about the fibrousness of the result, because I will insist on making the iceblocks with an actual pineapple rather than a chemical facsimile, but it’s still their favourite.

So far.

Leave a comment

February 7, 2013

Super for Beginners

I was going to write about the lemon ricotta muffins which are currently holding off my kids from eating the cat, but they’re going to have to wait. For I have spent the day deep in treasury and I think there’s a lot about super you don’t know. In fact, I’m sure there is.

You may think that you don’t need to know about super. What would I, a humble housewife, have to do with it anyway? I, my friends, am treasurer for the Sydney University Graduate Choir. They employ a conductor, a rehearsal pianist, orchestra members and soloists. They all have to be paid super. It’s all very unpleasant, but it’s true, I’ve tried to wriggle out of it. Not as hard as the musicians have, though, they hate all that financial stuff, except for the getting paid bit. If you are a not for profit, an association, a company, a family trust, incorporated or not, you have to pay super if you pay any individual over $450 in one month. It doesn’t matter if they give you an ABN or come through an agency, or if they try to have super waived in their contract, you still have to pay it. It doesn’t matter if they’re still studying at the Con. It doesn’t matter if they don’t even have a super fund. You have to pick one and set them up and pay it in there, causing them innumerable headaches in later life.

I tell you what, there’s a niche in the market for someone to cater to organisations like us. Medicare, don’t ask me why, run a clearing house to make it easy for small businesses to pay super to their less than twenty employees. Because of employee choice, most employees will have different super funds, which means that every quarter you have to make a payment to each of those twenty institutions, each of which have their own logins and methods of payment. Through Medicare you can just set it all up and type it in like a spreadsheet. We can’t have that though, oh no. We have more than twenty employees. Usually not all at the same time, and many of them only once before they become too expensive for us to afford. So after I pay their super I’ll get letters from their super funds for years after wondering why I’m not paying in a quarterly amount. I just toss them in the recycling. The system isn’t set up for organisations like ours.

There’s also the fairly important matter of calculating the amounts you are required to pay. Well, it’s just 9%, everybody knows that. Ah yes, but 9% of what? It took me ages to figure it out, I’m not the type just to tap it into a Super Calculator, I want to know what’s going on. We pay our artists nice round numbers. Say we agree to pay a lovely young soloist $600 for a moderately taxing role in the Messiah. $600 is the total amount we’re prepared to fork over, we’re not paying super on top of it. You might think that you calculate 9% of $600 and take it off the total, but you would be very very wrong indeed. $600 is the bucks that they get in their bank account plus their 9% super so, follow me closely here, $600 is actually 109% of the payment they get. You divide the $600 by 109 then multiply it by 100, shove that into their bank account and spend three hours attempting to put the rest into their super account.

Man I hope I’ve got all that right. Do you want to hear about the Register of Cultural Organisations next? It’s almost as riveting. Oh, and there’s the Australian Charities and Not for Profit Commission just fired up, it’s the next thing on my list to fill my fluffy little head with. Keeps me off the streets, you know.

Leave a comment

February 6, 2013

Swimming Carnival Accessories

“Mum, we’re allowed to dress up for the swimming carnival! Can you make me something?”. Year 7 is so exciting for the Muffet, they’re allowed just that little bit more freedom and it’s going to their heads. Swimming carnival is on Friday, and it isn’t compulsory to attend, unlike primary school. It is, however, very strongly encouraged and the Muffet wouldn’t miss it for quids. Especially as you can dress up. Looks like it’s time to get out the ole sewing machine again.

The first thing is to decide what to make. A hat? Hair’s going to be wet for some of the time, so no. Some kind of outfit? I still haven’t recovered from the school play. You know what I’m pretty good at. Capes. They’re only a step up from baby blankets and I’ve made wizard ones, fairy ones, a Red Riding Hood and a Jedi one. With or without hoods, they are dead easy and you don’t need a pattern. Muffet wants a swirly one in her house colours, so I stuff her house shirt in my handbag and it’s off to Spotlight I go.

Her house colour is maroon, so if we lived in Brisbane I’m sure the whole house would be decked out in footy memorabilia. As it is, I’m surprised at the choice of materials available that exactly match her shirt. Dance satin is on special, so I get three metres of it and six metres of maroon fringe, plus some black and white balls of that yarn you knit into spirally scarves and a set of knitting needles to replace the ones the dog ate.

For a travelling cape you make trapezoid panels, a big one for the back and two halves for the front and it sits close to the body. For a swirly cape you need a semicircle. I spread the material out on the floor and measure the width. It’s one hundred and thirteen centimetres, so I draw on the wrong side a semicircle of that radius. See, you should pay attention in maths. I cut out a semicircle for the neck of radius twenty centimetres. I’m not going to get all fussy about finishing touches, but I don’t want to leave the neck edge raw and I don’t want to muck about with facing and fusible interfacing, so I make a smaller cape to shoulder height to sit on top with exactly the same neck cutout. This has a fifty centimetre radius. I hem the front edges of the larger and smaller capes, then sew the maroon fringing around the edge of the smaller cape. Then, concentrating tensely, I place the shiny side of the short cape against the rough side of the long cape, line the neck edges up and sew them together. I got it right first time! I don’t even need to press the seams as the material is heavy enough to sit properly. A tab of Velcro at the neck corners and I’m done in under an hour.

How popular am I going to be when the Muffet gets home? But then again, how long will that popularity last?

Leave a comment

February 4, 2013

Oat and Choc Chip Biscuits

“It’s not my favourite biscuit”, said the Horror, reaching for a second. “I don’t love it but I don’t not like it”, he continued, alternating bites with sips of miso soup. He’s a tough audience. The Moose managed to suck down two in the thirty seconds between arriving home from tennis and his piano lesson, I may have to mop down the keys. It’s an excellent lunchbox addition, the kids are calling them choc chip Anzacs. I got the recipe from the Pillsbury Family Recipe Book which, though utterly loony on the salad front, has some pretty interesting biscuit recipes.

Cream together half a cup of butter with half a cup of caster sugar and half a cup of brown sugar. Add an egg and realise as it hits the butter that it’s off. I have been playing a bit fast and loose with my eggs, I don’t put them in the fridge. I generally go through a dozen every week or two, but the weather has been very peculiar lately and I notice that organic produce is a little more touchy than factory produced stuff. I didn’t want to chuck out the butter out and start again, that Pepe Saya butter is pricey. Worth it, but pricey. Here’s what I did. I gave some advice to the cat about checking eggs before adding them to anything. The cat turned his head sideways at me. He doesn’t care for biscuits. Then I tipped the majority of the egg into the sink. I put a little bit of cold water on top of the butter and swished it around, then tipped it out. Did that a couple more times. Then I carefully scraped the very top layer off the butter and washed that down the sink. Then I stuck my head in the bowl and took a deep sniff. Clear.

I cracked another egg from the same box into a measuring cup. It was fine, so into the butter and mix to incorporate. Add in a cup of flour, a cup of oats, a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, a teaspoon of vanilla essence and half a cup of chocolate chips. Nice ones. I was going to say not ones from the supermarket, but you can actually get Callebaut chocolate chips from my local supermarket. Mix it all in and put chunks of the fairly sticky dough onto a baking paper lined tray. Bake at one hundred and eighty degrees for about fifteen minutes. My mix made twenty seven biscuits. They spread out quite a bit. They’re not as crunchy as Anzacs.

You know, modern traffic really does have a whiff of rotten egg about it? Either that, or there’s still some stuck to my jumper somewhere.

Leave a comment

February 1, 2013

Yet Another Black and White Necklace

It’s a funny thing with committees. You just dip your toe in, help out with a stall at the fete here, offer to count the take for the raffle there. You think you can take it or leave it alone, but before you know it you’re on your third gig as Treasurer and no end in sight. It has to be said that it’s an excellent way to find out about an organisation, be it a school or a choir, and you meet the nicest people on committees. Utter nutters too, but you learn to spot those and develop a quick left dodge.

So I find myself on two school committees this year. Another funny thing is that I don’t think I’ve ever gone along to a committee meeting or talked to a committee member and volunteered for anything. I just find myself on an email list with a commitment to leave the bosom of my family every fourth Thursday night. Here’s a tip, if you really don’t want to be on a committee, and someone you know who is on one offers to buy you coffee or a drink, run screaming in the opposite direction. As soon as you agree to just pop along to Sarah’s place tomorrow night and just meet everyone, you are so gone.

There’s a cocktail party at the Horror’s school tonight, rained for the third year in a row into the hall. The president of the committee I’m on at this school just loves the school colours and has fairly firmly suggested that everyone on the “exec” as she’s jovially calling it wear black and white tonight and possibly forever more. There are two ways I could go. I could cop out somewhat by just wearing a black dress and trying to blend in with the crowd. Or alternatively I could join in enthusiastically and wear the white dress I bought on a whim from Dotti because it was forty bucks, sling on a black jacket and make a matching black and white necklace. Oh yeah.

You’d think I’d have run out of black and white inspiration after the end of last year’s efforts, but it just keeps coming. I’ve added a touch of orange, I believe that’s part of the livery colours but I’ve only seen it on stationery. For those who are interested, it’s Swarovski Red Magma.

And because the Horror is only in fourth grade, I’m going to be associated with this school for a long time. This isn’t the last of the black and white necklaces.

Leave a comment

January 31, 2013

Blender Apple Muffins

I don’t have Thermomix envy. Well, actually, I really do, you may have guessed that by now. But a result of obsessing about that magic German machine has been getting the kids to buy me a blender for one tenth of the price of a Thermomix, and I’m determined to get an enormous amount of use from it. So far, I have been extremely successful. And yesterday I made muffins in it.

They’re still not the greatest apple muffins, but they’re an improvement on the Green Apple Muffins I posted a few months ago. I think they need more fat. And wheat germ. Half of them are gone already, so they can’t be too bad.

Place into your super dooper blender three small or two large green apples, cut into quarters and with the seeds chopped out. Don’t peel them. Add a quarter of a cup of oil, a tablespoon of sour cream, two thirds of a cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla essence, a teaspoon of cinnamon and half a teaspoon of mixed spice. Zap it. You may need to use the poking stick (supplied with blender), or to stop the blender a couple of times to move the fairly stiff mixture around. Add an egg, and this time just use the lowest setting to mix it in. Add in a cup and a half of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder and half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Again, just use the lowest setting to incorporate that flour. Get in there with a soup spoon and make sure it’s all mixed in. I’m using baking paper squares again to line the muffin tins. You do need to prod the paper down first before filling them up, they’re a bit more fiddly than muffin cups, but they do look good, and that’s one less thing for me to forget when I go to the shops.

Of course the one I take a photo of (aiding homework) is in the second last muffin cup, I had to use them up. It is hard to get an interesting shot of a muffin, there’s a certain sameness about them. I feel sorry for magazine food stylists. Perhaps next time I’ll put it up a tree or something. This mix makes the fairly annoying number of ten medium sized muffins. Something else to work on, a mix that makes an even dozen.

Leave a comment

January 30, 2013

Pedicure

I have noticed in recent years there’s been a bit of a divergence in beauticians. There’s the traditional ones that stick you in a tiny room to do their thing and play dolphin music at you. There are the scary ones where everything is painted white and the ladies wear lab coats and they’re more than likely to do something to you that really should require a medical degree to administer. Then there are the ones that I go to. Usually in shopping centres, they consist of a large room full of massage chairs and manicure tables, the staff are Asian and I suspect pick a name tag out of a bucket when they check in in the morning. There’s also some rooms out the back where they’re happy to give you a vicious waxing, but their main business is fingers and toes.

I really like a pedicure at these places. I’ve tried a few, and I have a favourite, Channail at Burwood Westfield. The polish stays on for weeks and weeks without chipping, they’re unlikely to have at your feet with a razor without asking, and they chat to each other in Chinese which means that I don’t have to think of something to say to them. They also put your thongs on before applying the polish, a simple idea, yet surprisingly not universal.

I noticed a few things at my most recent visit. Almost no one gets red any more. When I first started getting my toenails painted, which was during my fecund years, everyone had a small variation on blood red. Those getting acrylic nails were almost all from the Mediterranean, and application required a tool that looked like an angle grinder.

These days everyone is getting gel nails. I keep my fingernails short, I can’t imagine wanting to glue on talons. What happens when you scratch your bum? You certainly wouldn’t be playing the piano with them. I use my fingernails as tools, my left thumbnail is particularly useful as a knife guard. No manicure for me. Also it involves getting the beautician a little too close, my feet are a comfortable distance away, there’s very little chance that anyone will breathe on me during a pedicure. Although a morbidly obese woman nearly sat on me after losing her balance stepping into her foot bath. It’s going to take me a couple of months to recover from that. Lucky Channail pedicures last so long.

3 Comments

January 29, 2013

Rustic Pistachio Friands

Yes, thanks, I did have a lovely long weekend. All I’ll say about it is that I appear to have acquired reverse seasickness, which can only be temporarily assuaged by spinning around like a whirling dervish. Some dive sites also recommend getting very drunk. It may come to that.

The beginning of the school year and the cupboard is, yet again, bare. I’m sure I left plenty of baked goods, but all that remains is some neglected fruit cake and a container lined with biscotti crumbs. The Horror puts in a request for pistachio friands. He had spent many months of solid nagging to get me to develop a recipe for these that he would find acceptable. Most recipes are just for plain friands with a couple of pistachios dumped on top, not even to be thought of. I managed to make some a couple of weeks ago, and he condescended to enjoy them very much. I even offered one to his piano teacher with his weekly cup of tea, but felt a curiously familiar xraying sensation pass over me as I handed over the plate. The Horror has inherited his father’s icy death stare! That boy needs to learn that he doesn’t get exclusive rights to any baked goods, no matter how much of a hand he had in the development of the recipe.

It was pretty simple in the end. I’ve just substituted a cup of ground pistachios for the cup of almond meal in the traditional recipe. I’ve been grinding nuts in an old coffee grinder we possibly got as a wedding present, and it does a pretty reasonable, if rustic, job.

So the recipe, if you want it, is really simple. You just mix together a cup of, in this case, pistachio meal, three quarters of a cup of flour, one and two thirds of a cup of icing sugar and a teaspoon of baking powder. Add 125 grams of melted butter and three eggs and mix well.

Except that I didn’t have any icing sugar, because someone at Coles today had my shopping list and had gone around before me taking everything I wanted off the shelves. I hate them so much. No, I won’t love Coles brand soft icing mixture instead, it’s probably made with the ground up souls of exploited farmers. So I gave my new blender an appraising look, and tipped in some caster sugar. I started it off slow, then cranked it up until there was a whirling snowstorm of sugar in there. Great, I won’t need to buy icing sugar any more. I should probably consider doing the nut meal in there too. What an excellent Christmas present that was.

Where were we? Oh yes, spoon the mixture into friand tins. That’s if you really want to thoroughly grease and flour them. I’ve been experimenting with using baking paper as muffin cases because I’m pretending to be an upmarket cafe, and they’re going to work well in friand tins because of the oval shape. So I take my baking paper and cut strips a third of the width across, if you see what I’m saying, then cut them off square. Yes, I should have taken a picture, but I’m in the middle of making dinner now, so use your imaginations. Poke the squares down into the friand shapes, then load them almost to the top with mixture, it doesn’t rise very much. I’m calling them rustic because of the consistency of the pistachio meal and because I’m using whole eggs. This is what they look like.

They look a lot more like real friands, with that rise in the middle with a little break in it, if you use finer meal and five egg whites instead of the three eggs. With the amount if friands we get through, I’m not bothering. These have a distinct murky green colour, a slightly chewy outside and a slightly heavy but recognisably friandy crumb. They’ve gone straight to the top of the Horror’s request list.

Leave a comment

January 24, 2013

Monte Carlos

I have a delightful mother-in-law. No, really, I do. But she’s one of those self effacing women who doesn’t want to make a fuss, doesn’t express an opinion, says she likes everything and everybody, and feels it’s a little sinful to be sitting down when you could be tidying things up or making cups of tea. So when she incautiously let fall one day that she liked Monte Carlo biscuits, I was right on it.

I got this recipe from the Sydney Morning Herald a few months ago. It’s a filled coconut biscuit, which I generally find too fiddly to bother with, but I have had miraculously bestowed upon me a second hand Kitchen Aid and everything is different now.

Cream together 190 grams of butter with 125 grams of brown sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla essence. Beat in an egg. Slowly mix in 75 grams of dessicated coconut, 250 grams of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder and half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. I don’t have dessicated coconut, I have coconut flakes which I pulverise in a twenty year old electric coffee grinder. This is a very sticky, wet mixture, and I may try adding an extra 50 grams of flour next time. Place teaspoons of mixture on a baking paper lined tray and leave plenty of room for them to spread. Bake at 180 degrees for about ten minutes, you want them golden brown. Leave them to cool completely.

Cream together 75 grams of butter (Harmonie, not Pepe Saya, as it isn’t going to be cooked), 190 grams of icing sugar, two teaspoons of milk and half a teaspoon of vanilla essence. With the Kitchen Aid you don’t even need to sift the icing sugar, you just let it do its thing until the mix is all pale and creamy. No wrist action required.

Tip your cooled biscuits upside down. They’re fragile, and actually quite nice on their own. Expect to break some. Grab some jam, I’m using IXL plum jam because it’s easy to spread. Pair up your biscuits and spread the butter mix on one half and some jam on the other, then gently press them together. If you eat them on the day you make them, they’ll be crisp on the outside and soft in the middle. A few days later will see them quite soft, but still rather delicious. I actually prefer them aged. I always have some butter mix left over, because I don’t like to overdo the filling. I would suggest eating this with a spoon while supervising the kids in the pool.

I have seen my mother-in-law eat these, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never know if she prefers them to ones out of a packet. Perhaps I’m over thinking it. They’re just biscuits.

2 Comments